We often hear teams say: we want to meet ASPICE, but ASPICE requires so many documents. Is there a way to satisfy ASPICE standard requirements while reducing development process documentation?

What Documents Does ASPICE Actually Require?

Based on my experience, I categorize the most important (hardest, most labor-intensive, hardest to produce evidence for) ASPICE development process documents into 4 types:

Type 1: Specifications

This includes requirements documents, architecture documents, detailed design documents, and test case documents. These documents generally have strict formats that vary by company, but they're broadly similar.

Type 2: Review Documents

Includes review checklists, review issue records, and issue tracking processes.

Type 3: Baseline Documents

Many teams store N baselines in their baseline library, each containing all documents from a development cycle—requirements, design, test cases, etc. Baseline management is a major pain point for many teams.

Type 4: Change Documents

Includes change requests, change impact analysis, change review results, and change execution status.

If producing these 4 types of documents becomes easy, ASPICE audit time can be reduced by over 50%, and development efficiency can improve by 30% or more.

Can We Make Document Preparation Less Time-Consuming?

Here's a bold conclusion: don't write documents! Then document preparation time is zero.

Let me refine "don't write documents": don't write documents separately. Team members should focus on project execution and solving specific tasks, spend more time describing tasks in detail, and then use tools to automatically generate documents.

Type 1: "Specifications aren't for shelf-living—specifications are to-do tasks."

Some teams write design documents that are very clear, beautiful, and well-structured, trying to capture every detail from the start. They finish a 50 or 100-page document. Next, they need to arrange tasks based on these specifications. But the specification is too complex, and Word isn't suitable for task management. So they start creating new tasks in a separate task tracking system based on the specification—duplicating the work.

Why can't the design document itself be the task tracker?

Another common time-waster: first create tasks in a tracking system, then when ASPICE auditors are coming, go back and create design documents based on those tasks. By then, tasks are already complex, and structurally organizing them for traceability is very tedious. Documents end up being prepared just for the sake of documents.

We recommend a better approach: write to-do tasks directly and enrich them. Once tasks are written, generate design documents directly based on the task structure, and even export to Word format.

Type 2: "The review process itself is simple—what's hard is audit preparation."

Anyone who's been through an ASPICE audit knows this. Reviewing a specification is something teams do regularly, even without ASPICE requirements. But typically, they do it offline in discussions, and when issues are found, they fix them on the spot. This is the most efficient way—but for audit purposes, it doesn't satisfy requirements because it's hard to provide evidence of reviews having occurred.

A better approach combines both: conduct reviews in a parallel, offline-discussion-like manner, while the process automatically records everyone's review feedback, aggregates review records, and produces results automatically.

Type 3: "The only reason baselines exist is for change."

Why? Whether it's a project or a single task, if we could guarantee no changes from the start, we wouldn't need baselines at all. Baselines exist precisely because changes happen during development, and teams need to know what the original requirements were and what each change was.

Many teams make the mistake of saving the entire content of every baseline. What changed between baseline N and N+1 becomes unclear. Many teams use "highly summarized" change history records to show change "details"—but these don't show the actual changes, let alone enable traceability.

Type 4: "Knowing when change is needed matters more than the change itself."

Some teams don't clarify when changes are needed. Once a specification is written, any change triggers the full change review process—making development complex and inefficient, and diluting the seriousness of change review. The end result: if every change needs review meetings every day, no one takes those meetings seriously.

Some teams clarify that changes are only needed after design freeze—but tools can't easily show whether something is frozen. Even if tools clearly mark frozen status, there's still the question of change granularity. If a specification is coarse-grained—say it contains 20 requirements—then the probability of that specification needing change approaches 1.

But if you split that specification into 20 requirements (to-do tasks), maybe 18 requirements don't change at all, only 2 do. The change impact scope is smaller, the content is less, and review efficiency is higher.